I am happy to announce that NEWVeeam Availability Suite 9.5is now generally available (GA) and ready for download! This latest version of our flagship product builds even further upon a number of enterprise enhancements introduced with v9 to help organizations meet today’s service-level objectives enabling the recovery of any IT service and related applications and data within seconds and minutes.

For a .5 release, 9.5 really stands out by adding a number of critical features designed to help enterprises scale more effectively and maintain Availability. To provide perspective on just how much new technology is being introduced, check out the What’s New in Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 and What’s New in Veeam ONE 9.5 documents for a complete list of each new feature with descriptions. For those of you who are just starting to familiarize yourself with 9.5, below is a list of blogs we have published to date on six of the more notable features being introduced:

Enhanced enterprise scalability

To help scale up backup and replication activities, as well as shorten backup windows while reducing impact on production environments, Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 introduces a whole new collection of enterprise scalability enhancements. Enhancements include accelerated backup performance, faster restores of larger VMs and reduced loads on primary and backup storage, as well as virtual infrastructure servers.

Additionally, to improve performance and capacity efficiencies for large-scale datasets, 9.5 is also introducing Advanced ReFS Integration, which in all honesty is my favorite new feature. Advanced ReFS Integration will help ensure backup data resiliency and the protection of critical apps through fast cloning of Veeam backups — creating and transforming synthetic full backup files up to 10x faster. This will shorten backup windows and lower backup storage load, as well as reduce backup storage capacity consumption with spaceless full backup technology, and ensure backup archive integrity by monitoring background data corruption.

FULL support for Microsoft 2016

And continuing a Veeam tradition by being the first to FULLY support the latest technologies introduced by our partners, Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 also FULLY supports Microsoft 2016 Data Center Technologies. The integration not only includes support for Windows Server 2016 and Hyper-V 2016, but also the latest versions of Microsoft Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint and SQL Server.

More great features

The list goes on! Direct Restore to Microsoft Azure delivers cloud restore for Veeam backups to improve scalability and increase efficiencies. With 9.5, you can restore backups directly to the cloud by leveraging Azure as an on-demand cloud data center for DR, taking full advantage of Azure’s flexible and scalable cloud resources. But if that’s not enough, we have also expanded our Storage Snapshot support for Nimble Storage users, including a new Veeam Explorer for Nimble Storage for fast recoveries, new chargeback and billing functionality in Veeam ONE to help better calculate the cost of compute and storage resources used within an organization or service offerings, and added VMware vCloud Director Support to empower tenants with self-service backup and restore capabilities, plus much more!

But wait… as always, there’s More!

Yesterday, with impeccable timing, VMware announced the general availability of vSphere 6.5. As always, we started work on the full integration of vSphere 6.5 since its beta, however we now need adequate time to integrate the final VDDK code and then perform full regressive testing against the final vSphere 6.5 code to ensure reliability of our advanced vSphere integrations. Therefore, full support for vSphere 6.5 in Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 will be delivered as a part of Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 Update 1. And while an exact support timeline will depend on the results of our testing, historically we deliver support for new vSphere releases approximately two months after the final code availability.

See also

It’s here! NEW Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 is available today, 5.0 out of 5 based on 3 ratings

Doug Hazelman (VMDoug)

Doug Hazelman is Vice President, Product Strategy, Chief Evangelist. Doug consults with customers, partners and industry analysts on key considerations for implementing virtual server infrastructures. He works with Veeam’s R&D team to enhance and develop new Veeam products to address market needs, and advises customers... More